“Is Emily’s number there?” Jake asked.

“What?”

“You said Sarah’s number was over the phone. Is Emily’s?”

“Not after Leo. Emily asked me to take it down.”

“She had a way with kids, your mother.”

“I killed her, Jake.”

“I know,” he said.

“They’ll find out, won’t they?”

“Probably. Yes.”

“How long?”

“I don’t know. Soon.”

“I wish I had died along with her.” I had not expected to say this or even feel it, but there it was. He did not respond, and I wondered suddenly if I was speaking out loud or only inside my head. I would not get to see my mother again. I would not get to brush her hair or paint her nails.

“Poison and medicine are often the same thing, given in different proportions,” I said. “I read that in a pamphlet while I was waiting for my mother at the doctor’s.”

I did not tell him that I thought it applied to love. I wanted to touch him, but I worried he might pull back.

“Eventually she got better at leaving the house. I could get her to her doctors’ appointments by using a bath towel. It took her forty years, but she graduated from blankets to bath towels,” I said.

Jake was thinking, and I was staring straight ahead at the low cement retaining wall that bordered the parking lot.

It always took me a moment to recognize him without his dog. He had lost the last of five King Charles spaniels two years before and decided he was too old to risk another one. “Dogs don’t understand us leaving them,” he’d once said when we’d met on the sidewalk outside my mother’s house.

“There’s Mr. Forrest,” I said. I indicated the dapper old man standing on the hill over the retaining wall.

“Yes, her only friend,” Jake said.

In the distance, I could see Mrs. Leverton being loaded into the ambulance. A paramedic was holding up a drip of some sort, and I could see Mrs. Leverton’s head above the sheet. Almost simultaneously, a smoky gray Mercedes pulled up, and her rich son got out. Mr. Forrest watched it all from the hill in front of me. He was wearing stiff corduroy pants with a crease and a gray flannel suit jacket, under which appeared to be a conglomeration of sweaters and turtlenecks to keep him warm in the unpredictable fall air. A cashmere muffler, because he believed deeply in cashmere, was tied tightly around his neck. He was at least seventy-five, I knew. He had stopped coming by to see my mother shortly after my father’s suicide.

“I think we should leave,” Jake said.

I was staring at Mr. Forrest. As if he knew, he turned his head in our direction. His glasses were the same as they’d always been-thick tortoiseshell squares-and he would have had to see me through the slightly tinted glass of the front windshield of a car I did not own. I looked directly back at him and swallowed hard.

“Did you hear me?” said Jake. “I want you to back out and leave the way we came. The shortcut.”

It was among the subtlest things I’d ever seen, Mr. Forrest’s nod of his head in my direction.

“Okay,” I said. I turned the key in the ignition. After carefully backing out, I drove away.

I did not tell Jake about Mr. Forrest. I was beginning to feel a certain inevitability building, but at the same time I didn’t want to peer too far into the distance.

“You’ll go to Westmore,” Jake said, “and I’ll call Sarah.”

“And tell her what?”

“Nothing, Helen. I don’t know!” he said.

I drove along the railroad tracks on the access road all the way out of town. It was as if we were fugitives. I hated it. Absolutely hated that even my mother’s corpse could still exact such control. Seeing a bank of gravel just ahead, I drove into it. The wheels spun beneath us and then stopped.

“What the fuck are you doing?”

I put my head against the steering wheel. Numb.

“I should go back.”

“The hell you will.”

“What?” I said. I had never seen Jake so angry. “I’ll go back. I’ll tell them what I did. You’ll be free and clear.”

Tears rolled down my face, and I turned to get out. He leaned over me and held the door shut.

“It isn’t always just about you and your mother.”

“I know,” I blubbered.

“And it would be nice for our daughters not to find out that their mother killed their grandmother, and then their father popped through the window like some demented jack-in-the-box!”

A train rounded the bend. The engineer honked loudly, seeing our car so close to the tracks, and then the car shook and shuddered as the train barreled past. I screamed. I screamed the whole time it took to pass us.

When it was quiet again, I stared miserably at the empty tracks. My eyes felt the size of pinpricks.

“I’ll drive,” Jake said.

I was wobbly when I stood, and Jake made it around to the driver’s side before I could take a step.

He placed his hands on my shoulders. “I’m sorry if that was too much,” he said. “I’m thinking about the girls, understand?”

I nodded my head. But it didn’t sound entirely right to me. It was not so much the girls as it was his entire life. His dogs. His career. Someone he had called “babe” on the phone.

“Your mother ruined so much,” he said. “I don’t know what we’re going to do, but we need to be functional. You’re not in your mother’s house anymore. You’re out in the world.”

I nodded again.

He hugged me to him, and I let myself hang limp in his arms. I thought of the warble of Sarah’s voice on the CD she’d made me. Of the dreams she somehow kept alive in a way I couldn’t imagine doing. She would come with me over to my mother’s house and describe Manhattan as if it were so much glittering cake. Meanwhile her phone had been disconnected and she routinely took back as much food from my house as she could fit among the vintage clothes in her duffel bag.

“Manny,” I mumbled into Jake’s shoulder.

He loosened our embrace. “What?”

“Manny.”

“Who is Manny?”

I went cold somewhere inside myself. My heart slipped in my chest like a chip of ice.

“He used to run errands for my mother or fix little things around the house. Things Mrs. Castle and I weren’t up to.”

“So?”

“About six months ago, I found a used condom in my old room.”

“I don’t understand,” Jake said.

“And my mother’s jewelry box had been broken into.”

“He had sex in your old room? With who?”

“I don’t know. We got the locks changed. Mrs. Castle knows about it and so does the congregation of the church. I never reported the jewelry missing.”

“Why are you telling me this?” Jake asked.

I looked at him but didn’t know what to say-what would be good enough.

“Oh, God.” He turned and walked away from me.

I stood by the car. I had not thought of Manny in any real way since the night before. I remembered placing my hand over the weeping Buddha but could not remember whether I had thrown it away or whether it still sat discreetly on my shelf.

When Jake walked back toward me, his face was ashen.

“We will get in the car,” he said. “We will not speak. I am taking you to Westmore. When you are contacted, you’ll act surprised. Don’t act devastated. By the time the police get to you, they’ll know you wouldn’t be. Go numb or something.”

“But I would be devastated,” I said. “I am devastated.”

“Get in the car.”

I walked around and got in on the passenger’s side. Jake turned on the ignition and carefully backed up in the gravel until we met the road again.

“I’ll handle the girls. I don’t know what I’m going to say to them. After I drop you off, I’m going to call Avery and arrange a lunch later in the week. That way I’ll be able to bolster the idea that I also came out for professional reasons.”

“Jake-” I started.

“Helen, I don’t want to hear anything right now. I don’t blame you for what you did. What I want is to be able to limit the damage. I have my own life. Manny is your story. I won’t bring him up, and I don’t know about him. What happens, happens as far as any of that, but I’m not willing to cast blame.”